Mr. Clean: Jeffrey Steingarten Puts the Master Cleanse to the Test

In for a penny, in for a pound, I said to nobody but myself as I took my first sip of lemonade. I had finally begun my total cleansing fast. For reasons that are sometimes hard to recall, I am doing the renowned Master Cleanse, the strictest and most difficult fast of all—except for the water fast. The Master Cleanse wipes the floor with any of the common juice fasts. For ten days, more or less, one survives on six to twelve glasses a day of water flavored with two tablespoons of lemon juice, two tablespoons of maple syrup, and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Each serving contains only 100 calories, and you can drink it hot or cold. The Master Cleanse is essentially a lemonade fast, plus an herbal-laxative tea twice daily and, if you wish, a tall glass of mildly salted water on the first or second day.

The Master Cleanse is reportedly what made Gwyneth Paltrow and Beyoncé so beautiful. I wouldn’t mind looking like either of them, though with shorter hair. But my concerns were far more profound than mere personal beauty. I was committed to three goals: detoxify, detoxify, detoxify. And maybe lose some weight along the way.

The Master Cleanse was invented by one Stanley Burroughs, who wrote a sort of user’s guide in 1976, which was revised and republished in 1993 and can be found on Amazon as The Master Cleanser. Burroughs sounds messianic and grandiose, as most messiahs do, but the regimen is straightforward and clear. Nonetheless, Amazon also sells a Master Cleanse kit, presumably to handle the measuring part for the innumerate.

Once I had gathered the courage, I felt an urgency to begin and mixed up the lemonade from ingredients we often have at home—organic lemons from Whole Foods, excellent maple syrup from the Union Square Greenmarket, and an old bottle of cayenne pepper from the pantry. With great relief I discovered that it tasted just fine. Before long I was concentrating on gastronomic refinement: I put a new filter into the water purifier, researched the availability of alternative lemons, and conferred with Lior Lev Sercarz, an expert at finding and mixing spices at his shop, La Boîte, on Eleventh Avenue, who was happy to create an elite blend of Aleppo pepper from Syria, bergamot from California, and predominantly cayenne chilis, which grow all around the world. These came from New Mexico, Lior told me, and combine a mild degree of heat, a round taste with a slight acidity, and a warm sun-dried note.

I set my sights on at least eight days of Master Cleanse. Anticipating an agonizing struggle with hunger and habit, and remembering advice I had read that one should begin one’s fast in bed, I assumed a recumbent posture and caught up on my reading: novels from Umberto Eco and Jo Nesbø, and some food magazines. My new assistant, Elise, brought me further servings of Burroughs’s elixir until, at the end of the day, I reread the advice I had been following and learned that bed rest is prescribed only for those on the difficult and potentially dangerous water fast. Fans of the Master Cleanse report a sense of lightness and renewed energy. I nearly floated out of bed.

I never actually felt hungry. My stomach never growled. The lemonade was satisfying. I am a great fan of maple syrup, and although I prefer it on French toast, it was doing its job here. As I had experienced during previous fasts—all of them on Jewish holidays—my mind-body system was continually plagued by food urges. I would have a familiar thought like, Hey, I’d better reserve at Acme before it gets too popular, or is any of that Grayson left (a wonderful, soft, pungent farmstead cheese from Meadow Creek Dairy in Virginia), or how about those amazing cherries or the ice cream we made last Tuesday? The thought would then move into my body, or maybe it started there, and the muscles assigned to carry out the task would get ready to go, maybe even twitch. And then I would remember that I was not allowed to eat. This occurred every few minutes—nearly all day.

And it continued through the second day, almost all of which was spent out of bed, on my feet, at my desk. But there was a pervasive melancholy, the vague sense that something bright and happy and true was missing from my life—a wonderful friend and not just a reliable route to comfort and satisfaction. I suppose that these are signs of addiction, much as the way you repeatedly reach for the matches in your pocket when you’re trying to give up smoking. But please remind me: What’s so bad about addiction? I can’t remember. Isn’t it something about giving up your freedom? Isn’t freedom an illusion?

On a practical note, I did find that switching from cold lemonade to hot and back again alleviated the mounting boredom. Then a genius idea came to me. (This is a private joke between me and myself, ridiculing some Internet food writers, otherwise excellent, who often refer to their own “genius recipes.”) Why not make a sorbet or granita out of the slimming lemonade? It would surely be fun to eat, be completely consistent with the Master Cleanse, and add variety. I made a mental note to try it the next day. Pure genius.

But really! Getting so excited over a lemonade sorbet? What had become of me? Food is my life, or at least half of my life, maybe a little more than that. Why would I give up half my life?

It had all started three weeks earlier as two friends and I drove north along U.S. 17 from Charleston to Hemingway, South Carolina, home of the eminent and celebrated Scott’s Bar-B-Que. Their specialty is whole hog, perhaps the most challenging of Southern barbecue feats and one I’ve held in the highest esteem ever since I was asked to judge whole hog (also known just as “hog”) in the final round at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest a few years back. (I had judged in Memphis several times, but never as a finals judge, and I was apprehensive until I had my first taste.)

So, there we were on U.S. 17, halfway to Hemingway, chatting about and contemplating barbecue. Our mouths were watering in unison. And then suddenly, without much warning, I lost my lunch.

Now, I’ve never used that expression before—there were no fraternities at my college—but indeed my loss of lunch was propulsive and humiliating, all over my sports coat, my shirt, and my jeans, all over the dashboard of the black Jeep Liberty owned and operated by my new friend, Joe Raya, patron of the Gin Joint, a leading bar in Charleston. Please understand that I’ve spent considerable time trying to figure out the nicest way of saying this. The V-word is out of the question because it summons up images of the actual offensive substance. In high school, didn’t we learn the term reverse peristalsis? But that’s not a verb. Upchuck might work, although its verb forms are clumsy, as in “You will have been upchucking.” Besides, the OED, referring to Wentworth and Flexner’s 1960 Dictionary of American Slang, says that upchuck was “considered a smart and sophisticated term” when it was first used in 1935, especially “when applied to sickness that had been induced by over-drinking.” I vehemently and categorically deny every syllable of that ridiculous accusation.

Sure, the evening before, I had enjoyed an ample and delicious dinner, then made my way to the Gin Joint and enjoyed several rounds—maybe five, maybe ten—of a house specialty: cool, delectable, and remarkable Manhattans (two ounces of Woodford Reserve bourbon in which the finest shade-grown Connecticut tobacco leaves had been infused, plus one ounce of Carpano Antica sweet vermouth and four dashes of Angostura bitters, all poured over ice and drained before much dilution had occurred), while enjoying cigars rolled using the infused leaves.

Yes, I had celebrated to excess, which I very rarely do these days, and yes, perhaps I deserved to suffer an upset stomach. But not four days of intestinal punishment. Later, on the way home from LaGuardia Airport, I needed to ask the cabdriver to pull over at a trash can on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, where nobody would recognize me. No, I didn’t deserve that.

What had caused my affliction? Somebody at Vogue suggested it was a bug. A bug? What is a bug? A beetle, an ant, a butterfly? No. A bacterium, a virus? They cause everything (except for toxoplasmosis, which starts with a protozoan parasite). An unwelcome creature had been living in my body and might still be luxuriating there, waiting for its next meal. The nerve!

I toyed with the possibility that I had been poisoned by the nicotine dissolved in our Manhattans from the infused tobacco leaves. I sent an urgent e-mail to my consulting physician in such matters, Andrew Weil, M.D., who, having been my roommate in graduate school, urgently replied. Yes, we had drunk a nicotine solution in our cocktails; nicotine can produce death in insects and reverse peristalsis in humans, but not such a small amount of nicotine. His conclusion was that I had experienced gastroenteritis, either viral or bacterial. I had had a bug.

Either way, I felt an urgent need to clean myself out, to perform a cleansing. And so when I returned home from Charleston by way of that trash can on Fifth Avenue, I started looking into it. There appear to be two major categories of cleanse, the juice cleanse and the Master Cleanse. The former seemed so much more attractive. I love juice. One of the thrills of traveling to the tropics is the variety of exotic and delicious fruit and the juice squeezed therefrom. Then I read warnings that basing your cleanse on sweet juices, with their high glycemic index, will do you no good.

For a week I procrastinated. My fear was that I would fail after only a few days. Finally, with my wife, Caron, joining me, I plunged in.

The first sign of trouble began on the third day with two powerful headaches—one for each of us—from coffee withdrawal. So Caron resumed drinking it, though modestly. I, who am a six-cup-a-day coffee abuser, found I needed only an aspirin and later a half-cup of java. Painkillers are not among my toxic vices, probably because I rarely get headaches, and one aspirin nearly always does wonders. Entirely on my own, I had stopped taking all of the pills that I swallow every morning. But now I was becoming so uncomfortable that I resumed all but the antacid, which I hoped should not be necessary. My doctor had offered to help me taper off everything, at least temporarily, and I will certainly try that next time—if there is a next time. I didn’t miss alcohol, which surprised me, as I am an enthusiast, and before the Master Cleanse, hardly a day went by without a glass of wine, a few ounces of Scotch whisky, or more. I had gone cold turkey without pain, without regrets.

Elise and I made a sorbet from the Master Cleanse lemonade, and it was quite refreshing but too tart. Its main defect was that it lacked body and had turned into fine snow, the fault of insufficient sugar. We experimented with halving the water in the lemonade, which improved matters but not enough. Success is close, and my sorbet may yet make a real contribution in the world of Master Cleanse. Then I could hire a small producer and distribute it from coast to coast and make millions.

As I tried to write, I found my concentration was poor, and my hand-eye coordination was impaired so that 90 percent of the words I typed had an error or two. Getting any work done was difficult. I was falling behind. As usual, half my e-mails were trying to sell me something new to eat, something old to eat, or a new book about eating. Many included nice gastronomic photos in full color, and my mouth watered all morning. Over the next two days, gifts of food—whether promotional or sincere—arrived every so often. I examined and sniffed them all, asked Elise to sequester them. She was free to eat anything she pleased. On the sixth day, Herman Vargas from Russ & Daughters, on Houston Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, excitedly telephoned with the joyous news that smoked salmon from the Baltic Sea, one of my absolute favorites, had just arrived from Denmark after five years’ absence, and that he would send over a sample along with their natural, gum-free cream cheese. I did try a few molecules, and saved the rest for the eighth or tenth day.

By the seventh day, I was getting weak and wobbly on my feet, and my thinking was scattered. My energy was fading. I frequently thought about ending the Master Cleanse, but I stuck with it. Caron saw me napping and said it reminded her of David’s painting The Death of Marat.

The eighth day was even more discouraging. I decided to quit by midnight—thinking that at least I would have gone for eight of the eight to ten days I had pledged. Later I would conclude that I had lost much of my sense of purpose by drinking only three glasses a day of the lemonade, thus becoming dehydrated and putting my electrolytes out of whack, which damaged my short-term memory and robbed me of my zeal. The imbalance had fractured my attention, weakened my muscles, and if left uncorrected for long enough could have led to heart problems, seizures, coma, and even the Big Sleep.

I apologize for not completing the fast in a responsible and instructive manner. As I write, Caron is still Master Cleansing. She’s now up to eleven days, went through a day or two of weakness, and came out happily on the other side. A little of her happiness can be explained by her adding a shot of vodka to her lemonade on two occasions.

You are advised to end with a day of orange juice and then a day of outright veganism. My preference was to eat part of the melon I had been skillfully ripening, and later a few bites more and a bite of scrumptious smoked salmon. Then I lost my lunch.

The Master Cleanse is not truly difficult, but for ten days it will deprive you, if you’re like me, of a powerful source of happiness. And it’s ruinous to your social life, at least the fraction of it conducted over dinner, which for me is most of it.

On the other hand: I lost twelve pounds. Most have reappeared over the past three days, so let’s call it four pounds. If I had continued Master Cleansing and lost eighteen pounds, I believe the same eight pounds would have returned; they consist of rehydration, replenishment of glycogen, and restocking your intestines.

I am more beautiful. My skin, normally pretty clear, is even clearer. For years I have been bothered by red blotches near my right-hand sideburn. My dermatologist has told me that they’re probably left over from a bout with rosacea I suffered seven years ago. Now they are gone! Will they return?

My sense of smell and taste were heightened. My salt sensitivity has been reset. The current anti-salt hysteria leaves me unmoved and unimpressed. But I have read that if you avoid salt for a period of time, a smaller amount will then have the same effect on your taste buds. And I had taken in absolutely no salt, no sodium, for eight days. This is normally impossible no matter what food you eat or don’t eat.

The next time I try the Master Cleanse, I’ll be able to avoid every one of my elementary mistakes. The goal will not be to reverse a bout of reverse peristalsis. It will be mere personal beauty. Which is why I’m pretty sure there will be a next time.